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This week our group met twice: once on Sunday and once on our usual day, Wednesday. On Sunday we converted the PDF of our text into a plain text file using Calibre, set up accounts on Github, and added collaborators. We also set the goal to have five specific tales from the book to focus on selected for Wednesday, and to start thinking about the particulars of our research questions.

This week’s group goal was largely devoted to developing a system in which we could systematically and uniformly identify and label any of the different themes we would find when analyzing discourse on immigration. Chris found an initial document to use to begin to formulate our XML markup in a Donald Trump immigration policy speech that he delivered in Arizona while on the campaign trail.

This week, the Tang poetry branch has determined the document analysis and schema design. We integrated xml:id into the markup. Id is unique and each person could get an id. The advantage of this method is that information about each poet can be written on another xml file which functions as database, making the markup on the main text less complicated. Therefore, we will have two xml document (main texts and personography) and two schemas for each of the document.

Currently the biggest problem that I am facing is deciding on what to tag in these political speeches and debates in order to best illustrate immigration discourse. Unfortunately, critical discourse analysis tends to pride itself in being problem rather than discipline oriented, and as such discretion on how to demonstrate the problem is for the most part left to the researcher. In going over a trump immigration speech I focused mostly on highlighting common tropes or frames of references. One thing I found was I had lots of trouble being consistent in tagging these tropes.

In the wake of being denied publishing rights to Fractured Lands we have decided to go with the critical discourse analysis. Last week we decided upon choosing immigration (a rather broad definition including the likes of refugee resettlement for example) as the discourse to analyze. On Monday we me and spent most of our time working on technical stuff such as establishing accounts and our project on Github. Following the meeting I sent out some works that would provide a general understanding of the applications of critical discourse analysis for all of us to read.

We were set back a little bit this week because we were unable to meet earlier in the week. However, our upcoming meeting will feature a discussion of the selection of short stories within the text and of the research questions that we've come up with since last week, as well as going over github in more detail. The problem of having no plain text version of our book hasn't yet been solved, so we're expecting to have to start converting it from the Google Books edition which is just about the only one we have access to.

Unfortunately, the Fractured Lands idea failed to pan out on account of the issue of copyright access. Therefore we have decided to go forward with the critical political discourse analysis. As a group we have decided the topic we want to tackle is immigration. Given its controversial nature over the past election cycle we will have plenty of material to work with, and I am certain that we can publish material from the national archives and very confident we can from its presidential project and I am continuously looking to see otherwise.

The first few days of our project has been characterized by jumping through a variety of hoops in order to acquire publishing rights to NYT's "Fractured Lands." As of last update, Zac had called the Times copyright center, who subsequently referred him to to "Pars International," a group they said we would have to go through in order to obtain publishing rights. Unfortunately we have yet to hear back from the group. As such, the rest of the team has been preparing to work on our backup plan, a critical discourse analysis of a to be decided issue.